We study the effects of gender board diversity on firm performance. We use novel and rich firm-level data covering over 400 thousand private and public firms spanning the years 1995-2020 in Europe. We augment a standard TFP estimation with firm fixed effects to explore the role of gender board diversity. We construct a shift-share instrument for gender board diversity and find that increasing the share of women on boards is conducive to better economic performance. The results prove robust to a variety of sensitivity analysis. This outcome is driven primarily by firms from the service sector and by smaller firms. The impact was stronger during the early years of our sample.
2024